Spring Clean Maurice

To anyone following this thread, apologies for nothing being posted for a while. The reason is a good one, as I won a contract for the first time since Covid and life has been hectic.  As a  consequence I have had little time to devote to the Challenge, but here’s an update on a busy few days back home trying to catch up a bit.

Hills:  The last post on hills left with the bases painted in dark brown acrylic as a prime color.  Since then I have flocked the hills with a variety of different colored flocks and glued down some clump foliage.  I have deliberately NOT added anything which makes these terrain features scale specific, as I think that can also be used in larger scales as mounds/slopes etc.

The flock is DIY made from some fine sand I collected on holiday some time ago, and colored with simple green acrylics.  The cheap store variety should suffice.

Woods: I had a variety of potential bases for the woods and used old CDs, artist paint boards and some old MDF bases I picked up many years ago.

Unfortunately I forgot to take pictures during the process, but I followed a similar step by step to the approach seen online by numerous terrain makers.

The first step was to create more variety in the “land form” by sticking down some DAS style putty in a random manner.  When this dried, I painted the base with browns and green acrylics and after this flocked it with my flock.  I used various colors, including browns and also some dried herbal tea leaves.

Once completely dry, I drilled small holes through the base to accommodate small trees.  These were made from dipping “cotton buds” (the things you use to clean ears with – forget the proper name) into a heavy dilution of PvA glue (I’d guess 80:20 PvA:Water) and then into sawdust.  This was repeated several times to build up a large “tree foliage” shape.  Once happy with the overall look, a final dip into flock was made to complete the tree.  The trunks were simply brown/grey acrylic.

The trees were stuck down in “clumps” and that’s that.

Marshy/rough ground:

The same approach was made with these terrain features as they are essentially the same, albeit the effect on the table may be different.

Marsh:  I used MDF bases and applied some PvA before adding some DAS to create a random high/low look to the area.  Once dry I started to add a variety of green flocks to the “raised/DAS” areas, building this up to randomize the look of the thing.

After the flock had dried, I then painted the land in between the raised areas with a bright green acrylic, finally toning this down with some “sepia” dip solution and finished this off with some tufts of brownish/green grass.

Next time I’ll add the approach to “rough ground” and any “missing” things I get round to.

Thanks for following this sporadic thread.